Sorry for PhotoNotes.org’s massive amount of downtime lately. Apparently things are continuing slowly on the fibre cabinet repair front. But the driver who destroyed the cabinet also apparently destroyed the pedestal it stands on, supplying power. So they’ve had to run new power to the box as well.

My apologies for the recent downtime on this site. A badly implemented and supported network change at my provider lead to a lot of general pain, during which parts of PhotoNotes weren’t accessible. Following several solid hours of phone calls, around 11 different customer service agents, 3 hung up calls, 2 blind transfers to wrong departments, and 2 unnecessary modem replacements shipped out, I’ve finally got things working again. No thanks to O2 Broadband.

So I’ve retired my elderly 800 MHz G4 server, which has faithfully run my Web sites for many years despite a sluggish CPU and an utterly puny 768 MB of RAM. Unfortunately the machine’s pretty slow and noisy and energy-inefficient, so I’ve migrated everything over to a new tiny quiet box. This was a fairly painful process, since I ended up having to recompile code for the new architecture and rewrite a bunch of scripts to accommodate changes in syntax, but there we go.

Things seem to be working speedily and well, but if you notice anything awry please use the feedback form to specify what’s wrong. Thanks for your help!

It’s been a while since PhotoNotes.org has really been about notes per se. It started that way, but now it’s full of long articles, extensive database-backed dictionary entries, searchable lookup information on various products…

So I thought it’d be worth revisiting the “notes” side of things and introduce a blog structure to the front page. Hopefully this’ll also make the site more interesting to visit on a regular basis. So, welcome!